A temporary home and repository for television and film critic Daniel Fienberg, formerly of HitFix.com and Zap2it.com and one half of The Firewall & Iceberg Podcast.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Moviewatch: "The Da Vinci Code"

"The Da Vinci Code"Director: Ron HowardThe Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 20In a Nutshell: You may have heard about the negative reaction to this one at its first Cannes screening and thought "Surely that was just an example of cranky, jet-lagged journalists being annoyed at having to wait to see a 150 minute movie and it can't be that bad." Actually, it's every bit that bad. Courtesy of Akiva Goldsman comes an over-literal adaptation that treats Dan Brown's sub-par pot-boiler as if it were genuinely important literature. That means that a disgraceful amount of Brown's tin-eared dialogue remains untouched and do 10 or 15 minute momentum-killing scenes in which one character after another lectures the audience on different iffy bits of history as if they were gospel. Tom Hanks, sporting a bad, but not distractingly bad, haircut is stuck playing one of the most insufferable heroes in all of literary and cinematic history -- Robert Langdon is like a drunken know-it-all at a party who has a boring fact about absolutely everything and feels inclined to share his knowledge with you at every turn, treating you like you're five years old. Everybody takes the material painfully seriously and at the aforementioned 150 minutes, I don't say "painfully" casually. And yet, there are people out there who believe that "The Da Vinci Code" is literature, that it's a book to savor. If any of you read this blog -- for shame! Those people, though, may LOVE this movie.

2 comments:

I hated the book, so I guess the movie is gonna be DOA for me. Yet, I will still see it as I am a SUCKER for an overhyped summer movie. I've already seen Mission Impossible 3 and Poseiden, for goodness sake.